Vladimir Putin has horrifyingly vowed to “finish off” Ukraine while taking aim at the British Army and the state of the country’s economy. This follows the announcement by Sir Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron that they would send an Anglo-French “reassurance force” to Ukraine after a ceasefire agreement.

Putin made these audacious comments while aboard a new Russian nuclear submarine, Arkhangelsk, during a visit to an Arctic naval base. He also officially commissioned a new nuclear submarine – dubbed “Perm” after a city in the Ural mountains – from the port of Murmansk. He said: “Not long ago I said we’d grind [Ukraine] down – now it looks like we’ll finish them off.

“[Britain] is jumping on us, behaving aggressively… but their economy is, I think, in the ninth or tenth place in the world. Hence the armed forces – what is it, 170,000 or 180,000? That’s all the armed forces of the UK.”

Putin continues to brag about his army’s achievements in the in Ukraine, particularly as the US, once one of Kyiv’s most significant allies, now appears to be pressuring Volodymyr Zelensky.

The latest iteration of President Donald Trump’s minerals deal, initially presented as a means for Kyiv to secure guarantees from Washington, has been labelled by experts as “an expropriation document” and compared to “holding a gun” to the Ukrainian president’s head.

Professor Alan Riley, a specialist in energy law at the Atlantic Council, described the deal as unprecedented after reviewing a copy of the latest text provided by the Telegraph.

A proposed US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund would oversee Ukraine’s natural resources, including critical minerals and natural gas.

The US would appoint three out of the five board members for this new fund and would have the first right of refusal on all projects.

It would also hold the authority to scrutinise the books and accounts of any Ukrainian ministry or agency at its discretion.

He told the outlet: “There are no guarantees, no defence clauses, the US puts up nothing. The Americans can walk away, the Ukrainians can’t. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”